I did a search for this, but didn't find any information. I downloaded large numbers of free books over the past few weeks and painstakingly got together the meta data for them, specifically descriptions and tags. Now I know that the tags get treated as "collections" and I just spent significant amount of time editing those to make manageable categories (I had over 3,000 tags since I had downloaded every tag when I sorted them in Calibre).

However, I have found no way to display the descriptions of the books on the reader itself. Is the only way to do it to reconvert the books and have Calibre insert the metadata as a page at the beginning of the book? It seems a little clunky to have to do that since there is no way to go directly back to browsing if I'm not interested in a particular book and want to go back. Any advice appreciated.

Edit: Okay, I did find a way to go back to the list in order to browse. However it's a lot more trouble than it should be. You press the options button and then press return to list. Seems to me it would be better if there was some way to display meta data without having to enter the book first, but if that's all I can do, I guess I'll just set Calibre to do the reconverting.

I did a search for this, but didn't find any information. I downloaded large numbers of free books over the past few weeks and painstakingly got together the meta data for them, specifically descriptions and tags. Now I know that the tags get treated as "collections" and I just spent significant amount of time editing those to make manageable categories (I had over 3,000 tags since I had downloaded every tag when I sorted them in Calibre).

However, I have found no way to display the descriptions of the books on the reader itself. Is the only way to do it to reconvert the books and have Calibre insert the metadata as a page at the beginning of the book? It seems a little clunky to have to do that since there is no way to go directly back to browsing if I'm not interested in a particular book and want to go back. Any advice appreciated.

Edit: Okay, I did find a way to go back to the list in order to browse. However it's a lot more trouble than it should be. You press the options button and then press return to list. Seems to me it would be better if there was some way to display meta data without having to enter the book first, but if that's all I can do, I guess I'll just set Calibre to do the reconverting.

Thanks so much.

Eric

Try this thread. My last post in that thread shows the metadata and descriptions that Calibre builds into the catalog.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm just not sure creating a catalog would be useful to me since it would in essence mean looking through another "book" and then looking back at the main library on my reader to find the actual book. I think the only option was the other one mentioned in that thread and the one I already mentioned -- I'll just have to reconvert the books and then have Calibre add in the page with the meta data. It's just a shame -- there are so many things Sony could update in their firmware which would make this a better reader.

Oh well. I suppose I could just switch to a Kindle 3, but I really want to try to give this thing a go. I've gotten used to the screen and no longer notice the glare, plus I really do prefer the touch screen for certain things, which was one reason I bought this as opposed to the Kindle.

And, as long as I'm on a soap box, another reason I went with this thing was expandability of memory -- though I think I was kidding myself if I ever thought I'd need that much memory -- maybe for music, but books simply don't take that much space. Even though I downloaded the Project Gutenberg DVD, I know 99.5% of it is stuff I'd never read so I ended up tracking down individual books I'm interested in which are already formatted and the DVD image is just sitting around on my hard drive, untouched.

Plus, I wanted the ability to borrow from the library back in New York.

And, it also happens that when I ordered my Sony reader, the Kindle 3 hadn't been announced yet and I was operating on the assumption of a $189 reader which I couldn't get shipped directly to my home since I'm in Israel, where until they started selling the Kindle 3, they were refusing to ship so I'd have to have it shipped to my mother in New York. But all that is off topic for this thread so I'll step off my soap box now. . .and try to enjoy my reader for what it does do.